Just to show some non-zero amount of progress on the Near Time Persistency Checker (a.k.a. the NTPCkr, pronounced "nitpicker"), I added some new fields to the science status page showing previous signals found where the telescope is currently pointing:

This isn't all that scientifically useful, but it is kind of interesting, and shows the basic guts of the NTPCkr are working - i.e. given a single "pixel" on the sky, show some basic up-to-the-minute stats about what we've seen there so far.

Please note that:

1. We divide the sky up into millions of such "pixels," and each contains anywhere from 0 to roughly 100000 signals of varying type. Don't get excited or depressed about any of these number you see.

2. If you watch the page, you'll note that "multiplets" (groups of similar signals of similar frequency seen over multiple observations) are rather common. So don't get too excited about those, either. This is all BEFORE we remove RFI and other garbage from the database.

3. I still haven't yet fixed known precession errors (which I mentioned before in recent tech news items) so the coordinates are slightly off, anyway, but nevertheless this gives you a rough idea of what we got.

The current NTPCkr work is focused on getting this running in near-real-time. This is the whole point of this extended project, as opposed to doing yet another one-fell-swoop kind of analysis which is painful and requires a month of focused manpower to do, which is why such things happen every few years. The grand hope of the NTPCkr is to be giving us good results every day.

More news as we progress, I guess...

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Just to show some non-zero amount of progress on the Near Time Persistency Checker (a.k.a. the NTPCkr, pronounced "nitpicker"), I added some new fields to the science status page showing previous signals found where the telescope is currently pointing:

This isn't all that scientifically useful, but it is kind of interesting, and shows the basic guts of the NTPCkr are working - i.e. given a single "pixel" on the sky, show some basic up-to-the-minute stats about what we've seen there so far.

Please note that:

1. We divide the sky up into millions of such "pixels," and each contains anywhere from 0 to roughly 100000 signals of varying type. Don't get excited or depressed about any of these number you see.

2. If you watch the page, you'll note that "multiplets" (groups of similar signals of similar frequency seen over multiple observations) are rather common. So don't get too excited about those, either. This is all BEFORE we remove RFI and other garbage from the database.

3. I still haven't yet fixed known precession errors (which I mentioned before in recent tech news items) so the coordinates are slightly off, anyway, but nevertheless this gives you a rough idea of what we got.

The current NTPCkr work is focused on getting this running in near-real-time. This is the whole point of this extended project, as opposed to doing yet another one-fell-swoop kind of analysis which is painful and requires a month of focused manpower to do, which is why such things happen every few years. The grand hope of the NTPCkr is to be giving us good results every day.

2. If you watch the page, you'll note that "multiplets" (groups of similar signals of similar frequency seen over multiple observations) are rather common. So don't get too excited about those, either. This is all BEFORE we remove RFI and other garbage from the database.

Hard not to get excited when there are so many of them. :^) I've peeked at the page a few times, and just on the last peek, was showing 27 multiplet Gaussians where it happened to be looking.

If anything, considering how tiny of a patch of sky that is, it illustrates how vast is the amount of data this project has accumulated and processed. Should provide years of possibilities for findings. Thanks for the always appreciated updates.
____________“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”--- Margaret Mead

Of course. That's why SETI@home requires as much computation as it does - we're scanning the same frequency/time space over and over again assuming a kajillion different doppler shifts. We don't know where the signal is coming from, at what angle, and when, so we need to compensate for that.

- Matt

Hi Matt, i'am glad with your explanation, doesn't these signals, due to the earth's rotation, gives all kinds off 'DOPPLER Effects'. Or are those movements to complex to 'call' them so?

____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

And I remember a time when Matt said there was a danger of running out of work. Why work on the analysis of the data when they can spend their time with a new CUDA project that will crunch data 3X faster - data that still won't be analyzed.
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